A modest primer for Ethereum programming

4 months

Jon EvansContributor

Jon Evans is the CTO of the engineering consultancy HappyFunCorp; the award-winning author of six novels, one graphic novel, and a book of travel writing; and TechCrunch's weekend columnist since 2010.

I’m a long-term cryptocurrency believer, pretty saddened to see the space degenerate into something about as interesting and brimming with emergent properties as an unregulated penny-stock market.

But there are still some genuinely interesting, technically innovative blockchain projects out there, if you look for them: Blockstack, Foam, Mattereum, etc. And at my day job at HappyFunCorp we’ve been working on a few ourselves, both internally and for a couple of clients (who are still in stealth mode.)

Meanwhile the world is full of web programmers, but there’s a real paucity of cryptocurrency developers, and the chasm between the two fields is hard to cross. So I thought I’d take what I’d learned from architecting and building out our own Ethereum-based projects, and turn it into an open-sourced tutorial for web devs, in the hopes of encouraging a little more actual development and evolution as opposed to blind speculation.

It’s great that so much money is coming into the space but it won’t help unless people actually use it to plant some seeds of innovation, and we hope that this will in some small way help make that happen.